Charles Brockden Brown’s Romance and the Limits of Science and History

Abstract

In this essay, I describe how Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels and literary criticism provide a critique of both scientific and historicist approaches to discerning causal relations and laws governing human behavior. Placing Brown’s work in conversation with David Hume’s skeptical empiricism and his historicism, I argue that Brown helps us to see the ways that, despite their significant differences, scientific and historicist methods similarly rely on a process of generalization and abstraction that Brown’s idiosyncratic gothic characters trouble. In developing this argument, I further contend that Brown helps us to see the limits of both historicist methods and recent attempts to draw on the biological and cognitive sciences to produce full accounts of literary works. In producing what he calls romances, Brown opens up a space for literature that draws on while refusing the classificatory and explanatory power of both history and science.